Barbell Shrugged - Real Chalk -  Become a Protein Genius w/ Kevin Lawrence  - 18

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

Kevin Lawrence is a fitness and nutrition expert, and the founder and CEO of Power Crunch, a line of “smart” protein products. Kevin is a former college football player, former IFBB World Bodybuilding Champion, and renowned speaker and writer who is knowledgeable in exercise physiology and applied nutrition. Kevin was raised in a low-income family with five children, where nutrition was not prioritized and often neglected. Often sick and malnourished as a child, Kevin realized his passion for nutrition at age 13 and pursued a career in sports and nutritional supplements In this episode, Kevin touches on various types of proteins from whey to plant-based, what our diets should look like, the nitty gritty on stevia, the benefits of high DH proteins over whole proteins, and MUCH more. Enjoy! - Ryan and Yaya ----------------------------------------- Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: https://thrivemarket.com/realchalk How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and perforamnce shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their fladship show Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.ShruggedCollective.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast  

All right, kids. I'm Yaya, and this is the newest episode of the Real Chalk Podcast. As some of you may have noticed, there's been a couple of changes around here. Instead of being on our own network, we're now part of the Boba Shrugged podcast team, and we honestly couldn't be more stoked. So if you're one of those new listeners coming in from the Boba Shrugged, welcome, and we hope you are going to love it just as much as everybody else. If you are one of our old listeners coming over from the other channel, thank you guys so much. Honestly, Fish and I are so grateful for you guys.

We couldn't have done this big step without you. And this has just given us so much more energy and motivation to just pump out these episodes and get them to you guys. We started with a bang this week, headed over to Irvine, California to Power Crunch headquarters and sat down with the owner, founder, CEO, Kevin Lawrence. And to be honest with you guys, it was one of my favorite podcasts ever. My brain was growing as Kevin was speaking. And I told him this as we were walking in that I wasn't a huge fan of his product. And there's a couple of questions that I wasn't a huge fan of his product. And there's a couple of questions that I asked. You're going to see them or hear them on this episode of why.

And he answered them with so much confidence and just straight up knowledge that I turned into a complete fanboy and walked out of their place with at least five boxes of their product. So hopefully you guys will do the same. And on top of that, learn a lot in this next episode. And most importantly, hopefully you guys will do the same and on top of that learn a lot in this next episode and most importantly hope you guys enjoy it. No, I can't really think of anything

that I would want to talk about. Okay. Unless it's something I don't know anything about in which case I'll tell you I don't know much about that. I mean we could

if something like monumental happens we can edit it but we usually for sure we usually don't yeah okay yeah like most podcasts yeah exactly all right good good good all right all right kids here we go coming at you live from power crunch headquarters yaya here sitting down with fish and we got the man the boss man himself sitting down with us, Kevin Lawrence here, former college world player, world champion bodybuilder, now owner and CEO of Power Crunch. Super excited to have you on. Yeah, great to be here.

I'm super excited. I've literally loved Power Crunch bars for as long as I've been alive. Yeah, this is going to be cool. So we'll give you a little platform to just induce yourself, and then we'll take it from there. Okay. Wow. You know we'll take it from there. Okay. Wow, you know, where do I start? I'll try and give you the whole tour

in the speed dial. Perfect. I got interested in nutrition. And I think, really, if I look at it, it's always been sports nutrition um although so i i read my first book when i was 12 or 13 it was this book by adele davis called let's let's eat let's let's eat to live or let's eat to get fit i'd have to look it up now got the book recommendation. I know, they always do a book recommendation.

They always have a book recommendation, so there you go. Well, this is an old book, so she's, I believe she's passed away. But, you know, that book was written in the 60s, and then she wrote a couple more, I think, after that, maybe in the late 60s, 70s. But, you know, it's interesting. When they were doing the Wiki article on me, I had to go back and, you know, get them some data about those books.

And it's not a big book. It's a little paperback. And I reread it and I went, oh, man, you know, this is so like right on for now. I mean, she was talking about eating organic foods and, you know, this is so like right on for now. I mean, she was talking about eating organic foods and, you know, eating a small amount of plant food, not trying to get your proteins from there. I mean, it was just great stuff. Yeah, that was 50 years ago.

Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. So I was born in 52, so, you know, this is like 63, 4, 5 in there so you know this is like 63 4 or 5 in there you know um but but what i found uh applicable really to me and the dietary stuff was too because i had a terrible diet uh i grew up in a pretty low income family and so the food was, you know, a lot of carbohydrates, basically. Pots, grains. Anything you can make with flour and some eggs, right? You can make a lot of it for cheap.

Yeah, right. So, you know, that impacted me. And so I started giving my mom all kinds of crap about, you know, what we were eating. And she was like, you know, are you kidding? You know, you got five siblings and there's no money. Well, you'll just eat what you eat right my sister and i just had the same conversation like looking back on the stuff that we're eating when we were kids and we're like wow this is fucking crazy because you just have no idea you know what i mean and well nobody really had an idea in the 60s oh yeah man

just you know just from post-world war ii forward, that's when all the big food companies really became, you know, started dominating what people ate and how they ate, you know. It is crazy to get older and look back and see what you ate. Yeah. Like every single little thing. I know I just literally want to be like, Mom, what the hell? You know, but she didn't know. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's cool just to look back on stuff, too.

Like, I mean, there were times where doctors were smoking while they were examining you and it was totally normal, you know but she didn't know i assume and i mean i think it's cool just to look back on stuff too like i mean there were times where doctors were smoking while they were examining you and it was totally normal you know and now you look back and stuff that we're eating stuff we're doing stuff that we thought was right yes and i talked about this all the time when i was playing football i used to eat like a whole pack of salami like every time after salami yeah and i was wondering like why i had so much water weighed and just like the, the sodium was just blowing me up. And I thought it was, like, it's protein. Like, it's good. It's got to be good, right? So I wonder now where we're at, like, in 50 years, we're going to look back and, like, there's going to be stuff that we're doing now that's absolutely ridiculous.

I think the changes you're going to see now are going to be more about adjusting for the toxic, for what a toxic planet we've created. And I think, because, look, basic nutrition hasn't changed. I mean, it's get quality animal proteins, eat colors, right? That's the plankton you eat. You eat colors and you don't eat grains. And you don't eat any food that you can't eat without processing it. That's a pretty simple rule to follow, and it works. Totally.

You know, so I don't know where food goes. Certainly supplementation is going to continue to follow the drug practice, I think. I mean, half of the extracts and things that they're discovering discovering now and and trying to put into bottles is crazy it's just i mean i don't see any difference than what we call drugs i i i mean you know and i like supplements and drugs like there's the lines kind of like blurring oh completely right i mean uh so there's stevia let's just talk about stevia yeah which everybody seems to think is so great stevia is a great sweetener

if you've ever eaten a leaf of stevia oh my god it just explodes with this really sort of it's sort of like putting a sweetened mint leaf into your mouth it's not really mint but it's just got it's own unique flavor and it's incredibly

sweet and it's just got its own unique flavor and it's incredibly sweet. And it's really cool. But that and the stevia that we put in products that we call all natural, right? Come on. I mean, they've used all kinds of separation techniques to pull out the little biostructure that they're after or some particular molecule. So I'm super excited about this topic. And I thought we'd get into this a little bit later, but in the research that you guys do, is there a sort of any sort of insulin response versus on, on something like stevia or sucralose? No. There is none. No. All right. Now there, there are guys now trying to say that there is some sort of metabolic

response because the brain still sees that as sweet and the brain being what it is would it would equate that with sugar right it just would and you're gonna crave more and more and more that's that's a new you know that's been around for a few years. I don't personally find that to be true. So I think until somebody really does a controlled study on it, there's just not, I don't have an opinion. I tend not to believe that personally. And the little data that's been done on it, here's what happened. So the people consuming sucralose were also consuming a lot of regular sugar stuff. So I don't know that, you know, just the studies are not properly run. And that's a whole area we can talk about but we probably don't want to but just suffice it to say that the science that's being published now is so much of

its crap and misleading and some of it's just out and out lying yeah i feel like there is definitely different different routes that people go into with either aspartame or sucralose or stevia everyone does try to talk stevia up and say it's the healthiest sugar that there is. Do you agree? So stevia is, as we know, it's not a sugar. It's a sugar replacement. I honestly don't know because there aren't any studies on long-term use of the stevias we're using. We're not using the plant.

We're not even using the desiccated plant materials. We're using incredibly, I mean, I've got six different stevias. We use three different kinds of stevia, and they're extracted for different steviocides or stevials and different robotiocides. There's several different robotiocides, and now they've, you know, the folks that we use as a supplier, who I think are probably make the best stevias there are,

and also in terms of their QA and their quality. But it's gotten so sophisticated, it's just crazy. I mean, I have, in our cookies cookies alone we have three different stevia's that we use some are more bitter some are sweeter some i mean they all have different little we're they're really tweaking the you know the whole uh the whole sweetener profile now so i just have a hard time saying how is that better than sucralose you know and i pick on sucralose because there are some issues with aspartame there are we know that and there's plenty of good science behind it or any of is it cancer no it's more other kinds of things right you can get headaches we know that

certain levels of it will mess with your microbiome somebody tried to say that about sucralose but then and I just saw this study two days ago we have a science officers named Jeff and I you know this study just came out saying IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, is, quote, tied to sucralose usage and stuff. And we're like, okay. Now you start reading this study and you go looking at the references. This guy cites four references right off the bat.

And if you go read the references, not one of them has the word stevia in the whole damn paper. But he's using it as a reference. And the reference is saying, diets that are high in sugar and sodas are wrecking your microbiome, causing you quite possibly being in a con.

That should be just general knowledge. But nowhere in there is it said anything about sucralose so it's like okay that's just how I'm not lying and these are guys with letters after their names and they're writing for bonafide journals

peer reviewed peer reviewed yeah I mean that one was in gut mag I mean what the you know what I mean so I mean I agree that there in Gut Mag. I mean, what the, you know, what? I mean, so. I mean, I agree that there's definitely. It's insidious, man. It's very, very strange, the literature that pops out. Have you seen the Bigger, Stronger, Faster documentary? Bigger, Faster, Stronger?

Yeah. There's a part where the guys, because they talk about steroids the entire movie. And there's a part where they're going over side effects. And it just keeps going and going and going. And you're like, oh, my God, whatever this is, I don't ever want to take it. And it was vitamin C. And then literally they're like, you know, I mean, the side effects of taking steroids is really no worse. So now we're going to equate it to vitamin C.

No, but I'm just saying, like, in that movie they showed something like that, and it actually was the true side effects of just vitamin C, like an excess. So, I mean, I think it's interesting that people have a take like that and it actually was the true side effects of just vitamin c like an excess so i mean i think it's interesting that people have a take like that see i'm not aware of those because the studies i've looked at um there was guys using taking 80 mgs a day 80 grams a day and that guy lionel's lion's pawing if you probably know him he's a mr vitamin c dude yeah i'm not saying that you know a lot of his stuff's older now, and he doesn't have the benefit of a lot of science and a lot of techware to look at tissue studies and blood and stuff that just wasn't around then. I'm willing to say that too much C is, but is it harmful?

I don't think so. Of course not. You get mouth sores, and you might get some gut problems if you're not accustomed to it. Yeah, of course. I'm just talking about the inconsistency of data. Yeah. And how people misinterpret it. Where did that come from?

Go follow the authors back. I mean, you follow these authors back, they're all tied in with Big Sugar. I was going to say. And yet they don't claim it. You know, in everything that's published, there's a, you know, if you look at the abstract, you have to claim any issues that you have or any, I can't think of the word. Inconsistencies? No. But always looking at where the study came from is so huge. I mean, what the health documentary they were talking about too.

And then they have like, what was it? The freaking Heart Health Society or whatever has like red meat sponsors like on their website. And all like they're paying for the study to come out with the results that they want to show. You know what I mean? And it's so easily skewed. And so going back, looking at the author, looking where the money came from for the study is so important because you can literally write,

you have two separate papers on vitamin C or sucralose or whatever it is, and they're saying completely opposite things just because they're going in with the mindset of trying to prove something instead of just being open-minded and just trying to figure out what's actually going on. Well, right. And part of of that even the form for an abstract includes that conflict of interest section and you're supposed to claim your conflicts and up to about 20 years ago people did for the most part i'm not saying that lying and

and i mean the greatest boondoggle ever was Ansel Keys, the guy who did the study on and demonized, well, he's the guy where we got this whole thing about the food pyramid and that everything was about your serum cholesterol and he he had all these data points and thousands of data points and he he convinced the government to change the food i mean and that was done in the 60s and that became there's still doctors looking at your cholesterol and prescribing statins yeah Yeah, that's crazy. That's nuts. I mean, the whole fraud in his study has been exposed over 30 years ago. And yet, big pharma, the number one selling drug on the planet?

The statins. You know? All these drugs that they use because your cholesterol is too high. And all of the studies clearly show there's no connection with cardiovascular disease none just none then they went back and looked at his and they found out he cherry picked his data points he literally picked out the guys where that looked like there was a correlation and right and just because it looks like there's a correlation that doesn't mean there's a correlation right it's just you know so it's it's just go oh yeah we could go down the rabbit hole

with that but i i just i i i you know i have a really good science officer and he's just as you know he's just as smart as they come and he's brilliant brilliant. And, you know, if I didn't have him around, life would be a lot more difficult for me. Not time-wise, but just his understanding of, you know, just human metabolic sciences. So, you know, chemistry, biochem, everything is so much, so far beyond mine that uh and and he's completely he has no conflicts you know he's because he's just there and an outlier right yeah he has no

reason to so when you're making a bar such as power punch bar and any of these other bar companies i assume it's like in your best interest to have as least amount of sugar on the bar since we're into the sugar cave right now so yeah so let's talk what consumers want and what they should want okay what you do want and what they should want but i have one question that that's going to go with this is so what i've read and researched and i went to school for kinesiology as well and um basically the smaller the amount of, like something like sucralose or aspartame or something like that, if it's under a gram, it doesn't have to be on the label.

Is that correct? No, no, no, that's not true. That's not correct? Yeah, if you use it at all, it has to go on your ingredient deck. Well, in the other ingredients, but it's not actually considered in the macros. No, no, well, because it has no caloric content. Yeah. That was going to be exactly my question.

Right. To piggyback off of that. So, sucralose, stevia, all that stuff is mostly used in like weight loss type of or like fitness products, right? Well, look. So, you can put on the label sugar-free, blah, blah, all that stuff. Right. But then you put the stevia, the sucralose in it and the hormonal response in your body is still the same as if you were putting sugar and it's just no no because those don't cause any insulin response that's why they're great I mean that's why they're

useful they also and nobody thinks about this but they don't like your teeth okay I mean the sugar the number one what does it do first it starts eating away is to get deep yeah yeah and it sets up a whole microbiome in your mouth that's bad so number one you you you rid yourself of that and with the obesity problem i don't i don't anybody that's running around yelling about demonizing sucralose is just not living on planet earth that not the society we live in right now today which is an obesity epidemic that's spreading out from the United States like wildfire. It's not just here anymore.

Go to Australia. Go to anywhere in Europe. I mean, they're not as obese as we are yet, but, man, they're hell-bent to catch up. They're getting there, yeah. So I just, I mean, there's over 22,000 studies on sucralose. It just doesn't have any issues.

If you eat like pounds of it, you can start to, and I don't mean pounds literally, but you have to almost go to the LD, that's a lethal dose, 50% of the lethal dose. You almost have to go to LD50 to get any negative results out of sucralose.

Because it doesn't... I mean, I want to believe that sucralose is it's i mean i'm i i want to believe that sucralose is fine if you buy it let's do anything with it's in everything so like right it's in there's anything that you know that i don't know i want to know it no the thing about it is is you're right it isn't a lot of things but i'm guessing you don't eat a lot of foods that have it a lot a lot of supplements do because i try pretty hard to not have it in things but you know i mean some things just have it like i and i love putting your protein powder in my yogurt so i know there's some in it but like to me i'm like all right well i'm i'm that guy who's like

screw it well and the one thing you and i always talk about too is the whole obesity epidemic and all that stuff i don't think it's linked to sucralose at all i think the sucralose for a lot of people like high that's hfcs it's like the one the one percent you know what i mean if your whole diet is perfect and you're looking for a little edge then you can start looking at like the tiny little details such as sucralose in your supplements i don't think that that's like if if a if a person who's obese and already has a bad healthy lifestyle and then they cut out sucralose it's not all of a sudden give them a six pack. Right.

But what I'm asking is, is there any negative side effects or like, is it something like we're talking about where maybe in 50 years we look back and we're like, wow, I can't believe we're putting in our food. It's been studied more than anything, far more than stevia. I mean, look, there's every industry has problems, and my industry is no different. But to say that because people have used the plant stevia for thousands of years, which I'm not so sure that's true, but probably at least a thousand years it's been around, that has nothing to do with the stevia we use.

Nothing. There's no correlation. that has nothing to do with the stevia we use. Nothing. Okay. That's just, there's no correlation. I actually love that you brought that up because there's so many people that are stevia advocates. I know. And they don't even know what they're talking about. I'm like, you guys don't even know. You don't.

You know what I mean? Like, you just don't know. Yeah. Like, it's like you're saying, like, there's different forms of it and there's different ways to administrate it and put it into your product and heat it up or whatever happens in that process. So, I mean, let's look at it this way.

Let's just look at aspirin. Aspirin, if it's used for a headache now and then, even a small dose of aspirin to keep your blood in a place, especially as you get older, less likely to clot. It's a good thing. And there's no negative things associated with that. But start dumping a lot of aspirin in your stomach every day. That's really bad. And not just, it begins with your stomach. It'll leave a hole in your stomach.

It causes all kinds of liver problems, kidney problems. You know, so something that's good here becomes really toxic here. We don't know about stevia because nobody's done any freaking studies using stevia the way we use stevia. So, you know, I might have, we might have, any product might have 100 milligrams of a stevia extract. How much stevia is that really if you're eating natural stevia extract. How much stevia is that really if you were eating natural stevia? It's several pounds of it, of the leaf,

you know, the actual stevia plant. Well, who's ever tested that much? Who's ever eaten that much stevia? Nobody. And nobody has eaten it when you take it out of its surroundings, right? It's like,

we all know that synthetic caffeine makes you feel weird and different. It's not like coffee. Yeah. Because coffee has all of those natural, it has all the other natural biology that's around it, right? There's theanine, there's several ergogenic molecules in there, and that's the way it works in nature, and that's good.

But when you start yanking out theophylline and caffeine and taking large amounts of those, you change everything. So I don't know. People just don't think about that. It's the same with monk fruit. It's the same with any high-potency sweetener. Yeah, monk fruit i see popping up quite a bit now yeah because it has a better taste than stevia frankly um that's another sweetener that's another sweetener yeah it's actually in that ascent protein oh okay yeah and it's much

closer to natural than what stevia is can you explain what monk fruit is yeah it's it's a fruit i don't know the the botanical name for it now without my notes but that's like one thing i haven't looked into so i'm not exactly 100 i've seen it in products so it's an extract that they take out of the fruit um and and they purify it and extract it same way they do with all the botanicals you know and they're not using solvents or anything harsh it's all um i think it's all heat and filtration stuff so unlike and i'm not sure about all the extraction techniques for the different kind of stevias that are out there but i suspect at some point you know to to create those kinds of separations molecular separations you probably got to start using solvents and other things you just

do that's just all right well like we said we can go down like a rabbit hole with this whole topic Separations, molecular separations. You've probably got to start using solvents and other things. You just do. All right. Well, like we said, we can go down like a rabbit hole with this whole topic. But I kind of want to circle back around, go back to the beginning of the episode. Because I know your story, how Power Crunch started. Yeah, let's talk about protein. It's also super interesting. And I definitely want to talk about protein. Let's go there.

Let's start wherever you want. And we'll kind of try and guide you where we want you to go. Well, I think we should start with how you got into it. We read a little bit about your story. Yeah, so we got started so yeah so i was a kid and uh part one of the things in that book was getting enough quality protein and she stated clearly that that was from animal sources and she also clearly stated you know there's problems with plant proteins and soy which was at that time probably the only plant protein that people thought of using as a protein supplement, right? I mean, soy was...

And the reason it came around is not because it was better than other kinds of beans. It was because there was a surplus of it and the government needed to get rid of it. And so let's all create an industry where soy is great. Now they say that soy is a complete protein. Soy is not a complete protein. For 50 years, we all knew, anybody in the business, any protein chemist or people doing research into dietary protein, it was classed as an incomplete protein,

like all the botanical proteins, because it is. Now all of a sudden, it's complete. I'm like, when did that change? Because like a couple of years ago, somebody started saying, well, it's a complete protein. No, it's not. Is it completely devoid of one of the essential amino acids? No.

But the levels are so low as to be, you know, biologically insignificant. So, again, more lying, more bullshit to support you marketing soy protein. I can see you trembling already. I was talking to your assistant and she said if I really want to get you going, talk about like plant-based versus meat-based protein. And we'll talk about that. But let's talk about your company, the story with your son how everything started i think that's super interesting yeah yeah for people to hear so he um i i've been formulating stuff since 1981 i think is when i did my first and this is why you were like playing college football and being a body no i mean i so i i when i started reading when i was age 13, I've never stopped.

So by the time I was even a senior in high school, I was taking more supplements and everybody thought I was completely nuts. Me, my coaches, my parents, my dad, everybody's like, you're crazy. And I'm like, well, guess what? When I was a kid up till the age of 10 or 12, I had, you know, viral pneumonia. I was hospitalized twice I had all kinds of uh just respiratory illnesses all the time I had eczema over half my my arms the back of my legs and stuff and all of that was diet related all of it you know um by the time I was 15 that was all gone I didn't get sick anymore. I didn't get respiratory illnesses.

And what were you doing at that time? Eating a better diet, taking basic vitamin supplementation, which would have been B-complex, mineral, antioxidants, and vitamin C. I mean, that simple. And getting a lot more protein in my diet. Now, I still didn't have a lot of money, so most of my protein came from eggs, which were, you know know in those days eggs were actually good yes you didn't have to ask whether it was free range because it just was um for the

most part and you could trust it you could trust the container if it said this is you know cage free now what does cage free mean it's way different it means nothing basically so you know don't you know but anyway we don't get into that we actually have a whole episode just on that

yeah that's great we have a whole egg podcast for sure but you know so those are the things

basically that I did different and then you know when I wasn't playing football anymore I pretty much tore my knees

to shreds same yes it's football that's why I told you I told you this You know, when I wasn't playing football anymore, I pretty much tore my knees to shreds. Same. Yes. It's football. That's why I told you this is the first year I haven't been competing. It's because my left knee is bone on bone. Yeah. I have both replacements now.

And they're good, dude. They're really good. We should talk about that after this. You should get one of those, dude. Just turn yourself into a cyborg. You know, Louis Ferrigno's had both of his. He's got metal in both. He's got whole knee replacements.

And he's like squatting with 450 pounds, and he's telling me this. I'm like, Louis, no, don't do that. Just straight cyborg, dude. Just take your leg off and just put like a robotic leg on it. Well, my biggest fear is to get one, and I need another one in 20 years. You know, I don't want to do that. Well, no. So these are pretty indestructible.

If you wear out the meniscus, you can replace that. But the metal's okay. Should be. I don't know. If you're doing super heavy squatting, probably not great for the joint. Nah, he doesn't. He's a lightweight. Anyways, back to my son.

Yeah. He's born. I'm doing, I at the time was doing a bunch of research, and I was, so at that time I had a business, and I was making, I was formulating supplements for other companies, and then I would manufacture them, put their packaging or labeling on them, and sell them to them. Is that ProtoWay?

Is that that company? ProtoWay was, no. This was a company I had called Menaphysique. Okay. And all we did you know I formulated products. I sold them. I had a good business with multi-level companies you know direct marketing companies and a lot of it was weight loss but I had sleep formulas. I had you know serenity formulas you know, serenity formulas, you know, adaptogen formulas. And they were basically combinations of botanicals and amino acids. And I had a guy that I worked with because, you know, I'm certainly not into Chinese medicine,

but I knew a guy named Bill Brevort, and he had a company called Eastertherb, and he was a trained Chinese botanical scientist and so I worked with him and we worked these things out and it was great you know there were great formulas and then my son was born and you know eight weeks after he was born well for starters he didn't he wasn't able to to nurse because my he was a c-section and my wife got kind of ill right after she delivered and she was having a toxic

reaction to the antibiotics and so she couldn't nurse him for about a week or so and then and then she stopped producing milk at that point so it was just he so he started life on a formula and he was on so fast forward he's about eight weeks old and he uh you know just gets this bad case of diarrhea and and it just won't go away and so you know you do the first things you You give him these electrolyte formulas and Pedialyte and whatever and take him to the doctor. And she's like, well, we'll see how it goes. You know, maybe he's got a bug, whatever. It's hard to tell in an infant.

But this keeps going on. And it's sort of cycling. It gets really bad. Then it gets a little bit better and gets really bad and gets a little bit better and after about eight weeks of this i'm fed up with it and we've tried several formulas and now they're saying well let's put them on the soy formula and i'm saying no way we are not that's not happening so tried it with the wrong guy yeah so at this point i have lots of industry colleagues guys with phds guys that do nothing but protein research, and other gentlemen who have PhDs in nutritional chemistry.

And, you know, I'm kind of discussing this with them, and we kind of decide, hey, you know, why don't we just look at this, why don't we step back and say, should any child be on an infant formula? And the answer is no. Categorically, absolutely no. And if you were going to put them on a formula, it should have the same ratio of caseins to whey that human milk has, you know,

not the reverse, which is what bovine milk is, right? The other thing that, but the, so we said, we're saying, look, how about it's just, maybe it's this simple. We're pushing these whole proteins into him, a bunch of casings, uh, because at that time nobody made a whey based children's formula. And I don't, I think there's some use of it out there today, but because it's more expensive, they just didn't use it. There's stuff, casings in there and caseinates.

And expect a child who's just born who has no microbiome. You know, when you come out of the womb, you have no microbiome. There's no organisms in your gut. That's the first thing you get from your mom's milk is you start building your own microbiome because that's a constituent of the milk. It helps you digest it. The proteins are, even though they're whey and casein and a lot of the same peptides

that are in other mammalian milk, it's not human, right? And that milk is designed for our intestinal tract. It's not meant to feed a cow or a pig and vice versa. So as you might imagine, absorption is just different. And anyways, we presented this to his pediatrician and she said, I think you could be right. Absolutely think you could be right. And I was floored. I was prepared for this big argument, you know, because I think you could be right. I'm like, well, what do we do about that and

she says well there's a formula called new tram agenda it does have some hydrolyzed protein in it so we tried that and he actually got better for about a week and a half and then he started cycling downhill again and I'm like okay well maybe that's so did some research about that and talked to the actually protein chemists at Abbott and Mead Johnson and people who were making infant formulas, especially that one, which was made by Mead Johnson at the time. And I talked to a protein chemist there and I said, you know, how hydrolyzed is this? Is it really hydrolyzed or is it just a little bit?

Can we talk about that one? Yeah, let's talk about hydrolysis. Excuse me. So that's talk about hydrolysis. Excuse me. So that's what happens in our gut. When we consume protein, it goes in the stomach, gets bathed in some hydrochloric acid and a little pepsin,

and that starts to break the surface molecular bonds on any protein, if it can. guess which ones it doesn't work well on plant proteins it's not we we don't have any plumbing that was evolved over several million years to eat it to gate to to get our protein from those foods okay because we got our protein much more uh much more efficiently from from animal sources right and that's why we have the plumbing we do but but back but but so hydrolysis is what happens in the gut anyways and what that is is you take this large molecule and you chop it up into much smaller peptides right So a protein molecule is a collection of amino acids, but more specifically, it's a collection of small peptides because when our gut is digesting, it doesn't

normally take everything down to amino acids. We do need to reduce those big molecules, which might have, you know, hundreds, or in the case of some plant proteins thousands of amino acids those cannot pass out of the intestines so our body really can't use them can't even feed the needs of the lining of the gut which is the first thing that gets protein right it's the lining of the gut and it needs a lot of it because it's building itself a whole new lining every two days okay and so you know that's a lot of waste and that's a lot of cellular tissue that has to be replaced so i love the building analogy you guys have on your website as well saying that your body's basically if you want to go into that real quick yeah well i think. I think I was reading it and I was like,

this is the best explanation I've ever seen on hydrolysis in general. Yeah, that's a new one. We've had lots of them over the years. So if you look at a city and it's got a bunch of buildings, right? I love this. And the building is really our body. And those, I mean, I'm sorry, city is is is a tissue let's say it's your let's say it's your muscle tissue right and so it's got all these different um all these

different buildings in it and those are those are um those are protein molecules and they're used in a you know right we have actin myosin fibers. But actin and myosin are composed of a bunch of amino acids, basically. Actually, proteins, small peptides. But for us to utilize the stuff we eat, all of that protein has to get chopped up into these really tiny pieces. And those pieces are either single amino acids or dire tripeptides and so that's those are the two smallest protein chains in existence right two aminos or three aminos and they're still bound together in a very small protein molecule we call those peptides actually

i call them micropeptides i think anything that has under 10 amino acids I've turned micropeptide because those all can be Digested much more quickly than whole proteins But if they're twos and threes, they don't need any diet for their digestion. They're ready to get absorbed right now That's what's in proto way. That's what we sell and that's a true Hydrolyzate not like the things and some of the other protein powders that are out there that claim to have hydrolysates. They have what are called low DH. So they're barely hydrolyzed. So they haven't reduced this big molecule down to these tiny ones.

It's been reduced maybe a little bit. Does not have the same effect as a true hydrolysate does. Does anyone have a product similar to this? We've tested everybody's and we haven't found high DH in anybody's. And I don't want to name names because we all know who makes the protein powders out there that have hydrolisates in them. And they are correctly called hydrolisates. What you're not getting is the fact that if you just sort of wash it real quick and you take the average

molecular size down by a couple of percentage points that that doesn't really affect its digestibility the big job still has to be done in the gut but you get to put it on your label but you get to call it a hydrolysis and indeed that's what it is. I would call those, in the industry, we call that a low DH, meaning a low degree of hydrolysis. It will create a better absorbing protein, but not by a big factor. If you do a high DH, now you're talking about something that has most of its protein, 40% to 50 of of what the protein is is dientrite peptides okay that's a whole different animal that goes into

you and those peptides the minute they come out of your stomach or absorb they're they're taken up by these transporters called pep2 transporters and they're delivered right into the blood immediately. We've done clinical trials on our protein. We've done three now. We've done one at the University of Missouri and two at Auburn. And some of the data that's come back was we looked at and we compared our hydrolysates with a whey protein concentrate formula. So that would be whole whey protein molecules versus

our high DH. And what we found is we didn't start seeing protein in the blood on the whey protein concentrate for almost two hours. So when people say it's rapidly absorbed, that's not really true. I mean, it's all relative. If you want to compare that to caseins, which don't start to see for six to eight hours, okay, that is rapid. But compared to hydrolysate, which was completely absorbed, had been completely uptaken into the blood in 35 minutes. 35 minutes. So it started showing up in the blood in 15 minutes. That's extraordinary. Which is so crucial because, like, we talk about this all the time, like, food timing, like when to eat, when to eat what. So if I'm eating something post-workout because I'm thinking, okay, I've got to get proteins and I've got to do this, and it's not actually absorbed until two hours later, you might not actually get the exact effect that you were looking for in the first place. Exactly.

That's really true. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think if you're going to eat some protein at bedtime, you'd probably want to eat casings. Right. So you have something to feed on all night long. Well, and also it's going to help you sleep better. There's a lot of, like, one of the things about hydrolystates is they're pretty stimulating. I mean, if you dump one of those blasts like 30 minutes before you train,

you will absolutely feel it. You'll absolutely feel it. You'll get a lengthened endurance, and you'll feel it mentally because what we know is some of the things that hydrolysates do, some of the actions that they cause metabolically, don't happen when you consume whole protein. And we found this out when we compared whey protein concentrate with, and we made a protein shake that was exactly the same

in terms of all the other nutrients. It was the same formula except we swapped out the proteins. And we saw these massive differences um we also know that a whey protein stimulates with uh lipolysis it stimulates your body convert fat cells into into fatty acids and push them into the blood for fuel we know that because we saw it. We saw it in the blood studies. It's amazing. And, you know, so now guys that are sort of at the out front of protein research, it's all pretty well known that if you're looking to gain lean mass, you really want to hydrolyze protein because it has all these other stimulating effects that you will never

get from a whole protein so now i have a two-part question this is good this is for all the listeners i think when people go into either a supplement store or a gas station or they're buying a supplement product they're looking at how much grams of protein are per serving yeah so two-part question in your opinion how much protein can someone absorb in in one sitting and this is the biggest fucking question ever there may there may be like multiple uh reasons for that yeah and and so if we're talking about whole proteins that's that's something that's been answered and looked at in a lot of studies. There's so much conflicting stuff, though. Some people are saying you can only absorb 30 grams.

People are only saying this. So here's the problem with it. You poop out the rest. You do all this. There's so many. And that's actually factual. And here's why. If you think about it, whatever protein you eat has to get reduced to these little small micropeptides. It's all about how long that takes.

Because once they get to that state, you know, either the PEP2, which are transporters which carry di- and tripeptides across, or amino acid transporters, will then carry them into the blood. But they can't do that until they get to that size. So it's really about the nature of the protein that you're eating. Let's just look at red meat.

Red meat, because it's surrounded by all this connective tissue and stuff, which retards the digestive rate. You know, if you eat like you ate this eight ounce Spencer steak, right? You're still digesting protein from that 14, 16 hours later. You know, pretty much until it gets to the end of your small intestine. That's a long digestive time. and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean that's the way we evolved, eating those kinds of proteins, right? But what happens if your body doesn't have to expend all of that energy and repair all of that gut tissue? Because remember, the effect on the lining of the gut trying to digest protein is very caustic and it's and it

causes a lot of damage i mean it's normal but it's still what happens and so you know so then you have a lot of the protein that you eat first off is going just to repair the lining of your gut because that's the first thing that has access to dietary proteins the lining of your gut and you know you got 27 28 feet of small intestine and another 10 feet of uh large intestine and colon i mean it's it's a lot of it's a lot of use and that's before it starts getting out to your muscles and your immune system and you're and entering into the brain chemistry cycle so if you can put protein into your stomach that doesn't require any of that and that comes out of your stomach ready for digestion, here's the cool thing. These peptide transporters occur in high volume at the top of the intestine,

what they call the jejunum, right? There's a lot of them there. But as you move down the small intestine, there's less the jejunum, right? There's a lot of them there. But as you move down the small intestine, there's less and less than those, and you find a higher preponderance of amino acid transporters. So what does that mean? That means you're more likely to transport proteins that take a long time to digest. You're more likely to transport them as amino acids into the blood rather than these small peptides because it takes so long to digest most whole proteins.

And the longer you go, the less peptone transporters are available for that transport. So that's another difference between whole proteins and hydrolysates. It's not just that you get them faster, but you don't do this damage, and you're using a lot of PEP2 transporters. When you mobilize PEP2 transporters, that has a metabolic effect. It's like a domino effect. But if you don't click that first domino, you don't get that effect. It's like a domino effect. But if you don't click that first domino, you don't get that

effect. If you're transporting protein into your blood as amino acids, number one, you have rate limiting. And I think to go back to your question about how much can you eat at one time, your body will only allow a certain amount of amino acid content in the blood, right? Because it acidifies your blood. And, you know, your blood only varies over less than one point in pH. So what happens? Anytime you start pushing too much protein into the blood as amino acids, your liver detoxifies it, right?

It pulls it out. It deaminates it or or or uh or just pushes it and it becomes a waste product and too much of that as we know isn't good for the kidneys and so on you never have that issue with hydrolysates because we don't nobody knows how much protein your body would actually uptake if it could. If it wasn't for that. Right. If it didn't. Yeah.

So too much amino acids, your body will not put up with that. It detoxifies it. That's super interesting. Because we talk about pH balance and stuff like that all the time and how it can affect you and drinking and coffee and everything. So I never knew that that had an impact like that as well. Big time. Probably more impact than any other food you eat.

Yeah. No question about it. I have a question like that as well? Big time. Probably more impact than any other food you eat. Yeah. No question about it. I have a question for you as well. I think I already know the answer, but I'll still ask it. Always a big debate post-workout, do I drink my shake or do I eat actual, like, real food?

So hydrolyzed protein, as we just discussed, gets into your blood a lot faster. It doesn't occur naturally in foods, correct? would have to have it's uh no proteins in in nature are just bigger yeah and there's a reason for that you can pack a lot more of them in and make structures out of them which is what what they do right even in plants all the protein content is actually all the structure of the plant okay the rest of its of it's pulp and water and whatever. But the proteins are structural elements.

They're not muscle elements. They're not flesh elements. And if you just want to look at it from that perspective, you're just a simple... This is a time when the simplest answer is probably the correct one, is true. Tissue proteins aren't structured that way. And they're not molecularly bonded and packed up that way. They're packed out different than plant proteins.

And it just happens that because we evolved eating that, and in fact, we made the big jump and started growing this frontal lobe that is what distinguishes us, which gave us language and tool making and all the things that happened really fast from an evolutionary standpoint. You know, a scant million years,

we went from this thing jumping around, scared shitless for its life, scavenging proteins that other animals left around and eating grubs and you know worms and stuff like that too somebody was out hunting these animals and and eating their flesh you know or and and surely eggs long before we were doing that as well but those proteins are what we evolved our system evolved to want to digest. Because that's what we ate.

And it's probably really that simple. Because you have huge, other mammals that are huge, that are vegetarians, right? Look at their stomach. It's a world of, it's like alien compared to our stomach. You know, it's got several compartments. It's shorter, correct? Like the whole lot of to our stomach. Yeah. It's got several compartments. It's shorter, correct? Like the whole lot of intestines. Well, everything that's in the digestive tract is small.

Almost no small intestine. Yeah, exactly. It's all about fermenting. It goes in and out. Right. And microbiomes. It uses organisms to break down all that plant matter. Yeah.

And then it can absorb the proteins. But they're wired for that. I mean, they're designed for that. You know, even a gorilla, you know how they're massively strong, and they live on freaking bamboo, man. How much protein is that, and how easy is that to digest? But, you know, their stomach that sticks out, that's all colon. That's just a massive colon.

Wow. And so they eat 24-7, and so they're digesting 24 7 but if so you had any vegan listeners left they just left I just turned it off there's some guy out there on his phone fucking writing a one-star review right now it's interesting though because the whole world right now they they so bad I mean they everybody wants something new and they want to believe in something new and I think everyone is and they want to believe in something new. And I think everyone is, they really want to believe in this plant-based diet right now. They do.

They do because. And we're actually going to interview a plant-based protein owner next week. So there's this insidious campaign out there to connect eating plants as being good for the planet and kind and there's no question and i will agree that animals that come from kefos you know concentrated animal feeding organizations is what they're called that's that's the horror thing where they're penned up and mistreated i don't eat that stuff and i don't support that you know so i i before before that goes back to the eggs that we're talking about as well goes back back to the eggs, goes back to the poultry. I don't touch poultry, period.

Because I don't, if I, I'd love to eat chicken, but I got to go to the guy's farm and buy it. Yeah. That's the only way I would trust chicken right now or any poultry. Yeah, chicken is really bad quality right now. Yeah. Because it's just mass produced and the chickens are sick. The other livestock animals are sick when they go to, you know... Get slaughtered.

To be slaughtered, yeah. I mean, they're sick. They wouldn't live another six months, a lot of them, if they had to. I don't want to eat that meat. It's because they can't live on grains. Exactly. They can't live on grains and antibiotics

and they can't be put in pens where they don't get to move around. So they're filled with cortisol and you're eating that. And I hate to bring up something else, but how happy is that animal? You know, the whole thing about dairy cows being happy, you know, those commercials, they're happy cows. Well, there's a lot of truth to that

because if you don't treat a milk cow well, you don't get milk. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. This is why you don't hear people banging on milk cows because nobody mistreats their milk cows because if they do, they don't get milk. Oh, yeah. This is why you don't hear people banging on milk cows because nobody mistreats their milk cows because if they do, they don't get milk. Oh, that's interesting. It's that simple.

Now, they talk about giving growth hormone to stimulate them to produce more milk, and some do. We don't use any of those providers, and the cows that provide our hydrolystates are all antibiotic-free, and they're basically happy cows. Yeah. But that's a massive herd that's controlled by a co-op of eight farmers, and so they control the whole process, and that's pretty cool.

But big farm, you know, most guys producing livestock are not doing it that way. And anyway, so that's why milk proteins are pretty safe anywhere. And all this nonsense about, oh, it's organic whey. Yeah. Whatever. He rolled his eyes, guys. That's the only thing. Yeah.

Jeez. But, yeah, I mean, I think I got a little sidetracked there. I don't know where we were at. that's the only thing but yeah I mean I think I got a little sidetracked there I don't know where we were at

oh just a little bit we were basically talking about everyone trying to shift over to the plant well so so

you know if you read the books that support that idea that a plant-based diet is good what you're never reading is the consequence of agriculture

on this planet and I think agriculture in my opinion is equally as bad What you're never reading is the consequence of agriculture on this planet. I think agriculture, in my opinion, is equally as bad, if not worse, maybe. It's probably worse, at least in the short run. Right, because there's no topsoil left. The estimates are now that there's basically maybe 2% of the topsoil left on the planet that was here 100 years ago. That's pretty scary stuff. 2%?

2%. Wow. Nobody's replacing it. They've stripped it off. And so now, look, if all these grains, all these grains, basically wheat and soy and rice, which are pretty much the grains that the planet survives on, they're grown on soil that just doesn't have any nutrients so they have to go put it in so that's where they use these petroleum-based fertilizers same thing with the

pesticides they've disrupted the whole proper cycle of farming and the problem is a couple fold number one they dammed up all the water supplies so they changed the kind of land that was there. Swamps are gone, except for maybe down in Florida where you can't grow anything in that anyways. But we still need those because there's animals that live there and there's microorganisms. You know, I mean, so we've changed all of that by damming up water so that we can make all this agriculture. And we started feeding people grains. Even if you're not a vegetarian, most of the bulk of what people are eating is grain products, right? Mostly wheat.

Yeah. Especially in this country. So wheat and corn. I'm sorry, we forgot corn. The number one problem on the planet. The two biggest money makers. Well, you know, the corn they have now that they've developed, this shit gets 80% of its, 80 to 85% of its nutrition directly from the sun.

Excuse me? How much nutrients can be in that? I mean, we're not plants. We don't do photosynthesis. So, and the other statistic, along with that 2% topsoil one that I think is scary, is that all the major river deltas are dead now. They're dead.

From all the top, it's not just, and where did that topsoil go? It got washed into the, it got, it didn't get replaced, and then the pesticides and whatever topsoil was there came along in the rains and pushed it into the rivers, which pushed it into the deltas. So now you've got a toxic situation

for all of the indigenous plant life and animal life that was there. And now what's living there? Bunch of different algaes and microorganisms, not stuff we use for food. So that's farming for you. That's agriculture. And also, of all the agriculture that's done, something like 80% of it are those three grains, corn, wheat, and rice, and soy, actually four grains. That doesn't account for guys who have good farms like

this guy Joel Salatin. I think it's called Happy Face Farms. It's a big farm, 500, 700 acres on the East Coast. He does farming right, you know, soup to nuts. And he's producing livestock, poultry. I don't know if he's planting any grains or not. He probably is, but he doesn't feed those things. What's the name of the company again? His name's Joel Salatin, and he's kind of like the

figurehead of modern proper farming and he does it and there's other farms I don't know if there's any out here but I do know there's some some more farms like that on the East Coast I think he's in Virginia or Delaware I'm not really sure but you know he has a sustainable farm where he produces everything from livestock to plant products. That was actually my next question for you. It's interesting to see how everything, especially in the nutrition world, kind of goes full circle. Like history repeats itself and it just keeps going around and around. You were saying wheat is like a huge staple in the diet right now.

So now all of a sudden everything's gluten-free. People are saying wheat is bad and this and that. It is. We're kind of getting away from that. Moving on, we were talking about the chicken, the poultry, how bad it is, how poor those animals are treated. But supply and demand have a lot to do with that. If you look at the numbers of how many chickens Americans eat a year, it's absurd.

It's absolutely insane. So where do you think this is going i mean you were talking about that more sustainable farm life but is that would something like that be able to exist and feed the entire country let's talk about the planet instead yeah no too many people i mean you're no matter how you approach this issue of plant diet animal-based protein diet whatever it is it all ends up in the same place it's not sustainable uh if you want to keep the planet healthy and the people healthy right i mean people need to eat proper food not this mass corporate farmed crap that's all grain-based stuff. I mean, most of the processed foods that you look at except for the bar category,

but all the rest of them are all based on grains. They're all grain products, right? If it's processed and in a package, it's pretty much a grain product. So, I mean, you know, there's some chips that use vegetable flours and stuff, but let's face it, the tonnage is all that. And if we go back and we look at just human health you know it's it's generally considering that farming as a as

a worldwide concept and as a place to produce food um agriculture as we think of it started about 15 000 years ago now there's's studies that have been done of populations. The most famous one I know of was they were looking at the bones and remains of some people around the Mediterranean, and they had samples of their skeletal remains. And you can tell a lot from skeletons. You can look at the teeth, and then you can look at the tools when you enter. What were they using with their tools?

If you look at the bones of the animals they were eating, you can tell how those were eaten and processed. And so here you have a population prior to the advent of what we now call modern farming. And this goes back maybe 15,000, 18,000 years. And those remains, those people's dentures were straight. They didn't have cancer. They didn't die of those things. They didn't die of the kind of all these metabolic diseases that we have now, including all the kinds of cancer.

They didn't die of those things. They had other things. Bacteria got out of hand. They didn't process their waste properly. So they had other ways of dying, of course. A lot of it was bacterial infection and just getting killed because people killed each other. Yeah.

Maybe we should just go back to that. I see what you're saying. It's the only way. We've got to kill off like 80% of the population and just start over. Well, there's been a lot of calculations done about how could you sustainably, how much of a worldwide population could you sustainably feed in a healthy manner. And the numbers are anywhere from one to two billion. Yeah.

That's it. We were already at 7.5. We're heading to eight like there's no tomorrow. That's the German in me coming up for sure. Just kill them all. Kill 80% of them and we'll start over. Okay, well we lost the plant-based and we lost all the Jewish people.

Yeah. We're in trouble now, man. No, but I mean it's an issue and no matter where you attack this, or you start this conversation, it all ends up back there, and even the people who've written books about it, if they've taken it out to the point to say, well, what are the solutions? We don't know what the solution is for this many people now. There's some guys up in Northern California at Stanford who have cloned red meat.

It's active myosin stuff. I have no idea what it tastes like, but let's set aside the taste factor. That's the kind of protein our body likes. It likes muscle protein. It likes red meat. And that's without farming, without, it's just created in the wild, basically. Yeah, I presume they're culturing it. They probably start with... It likes red meat. And that's without farming, without, it's just created in the wild, basically. Yeah, I presume they're culturing it.

They probably start with... I would love to know how that process works. Yeah, me too. That's insane. Yeah, it's pretty involved. I'm sure there's some, there's no question there's some, I would think there's some genetic manipulation and so on. But, I mean, if you're going to feed this many people, that's the kind of thing, because you can't, we can't have that many, that much livestock on the planet um on the other hand there's not enough milk proteins are

really good for this reason because a cow produces a whole pile load of milk in its lifetime whereas a cow that's eaten for the meat takes uses up a ton of resources and then only produces that much meat the cow is just a recycling of of the of the grass and the stuff it should be eating into milk which we eat so that's certainly part of that equation probably on a larger scale um is it possible for humans that just live on power crunch protein yeah i mean well look I mean it's a weird question but I just let's just say that we have 15 billion people yeah yeah I actually think that and I have lived on pure hydrolyzates for periods of time how

long oh months really just no food oh no no no mean, in terms of my protein content in my diet. Oh, okay. No, no, no. I eat fruits and leafy green vegetables. I mean, look, I... But for your protein source, it was just supplement? Yeah, well, and some occasional meat proteins and fish and poultry and whatever. How'd you feel?

Great. What I think, though though that my gut would start to become adapted to that and we do know that and so I'm I don't know but I think over too much of that you might have trouble digesting whole proteins if all you ever put in there was hydrolysis because the mech the the whole function would change and I think that there would be gut adaptations for that. Would it be toxic or fatal? No. But then if you start introducing whole proteins,

you'd probably go through a period where you had some gut issues. I have one more solution as well. That's probably my favorite one. You can technically live on just beer. So I think that would be my option for sure. If it came down to it, just beer so I think that that'd be my option for sure if it came down to it just beer for every meal and then that's all they drank in this country you know in in in the early years yeah the kids had watered down beer because the water was not good that's my secret sauce to everything

so yeah all right well um we'll go back to this one more time so we were with your son and then um he was getting sicker again you were meeting with the specialists yeah where do we go from there so I happened on to this protein chemist who worked for New Zealand dairy at the time which at that time was the largest producer of proteins on the planet milk proteins and they still might be way up there I'm sure they probably are they They're now called Fonterra. Their protein division is called Fonterra. So they sort of broke it off from their whole milk and nonfat milk stuff. But he, you know, I got on the phone with him and

I don't recall how I got to him actually. And he doesn't remember either because he, you know, he's still a major part of, he actually is the head science officer for the company that makes our hydrolysates. Oh, okay. Now today still. Great guy, holds tons of patents for production hydrolysis processes and so on. But I got on the phone with him and I told him what was going on with my son and I said, you know, I'm trying to get a hydrolysate that's actually really with my son. And I said, you know, I'm trying to get a hydrolyzate that's actually really hydrolyzed.

And I said, you know, I tried the Nutramigen. That was actually a hydrolyzed casein, and it was only barely hydrolyzed. And he goes, oh, yeah. He goes, that's not. He goes, I think you're on the right track. And he said, I happen to have a very high DH powder. He goes, it's just benchtop. We don't have it in production.

He goes, but I can send you some some and i'd be glad to okay he said you know i'm not gonna you're not gonna get a c of a with it you're not gonna get a he goes i've tested it for micros but i can't publish that to you he goes you know if you're concerned run your own micros when you get it and and i did and it was fine so i started making his formula with that. And he, this whole thing now had been going on over eight weeks of him cycling. He's not gaining any weight. He's an infant, and he's not gaining weight. It's bad. He's actually lost a few pounds, a pound, a pound and a half.

It's scary because I don't, you don't know what kind of brain damage might be being done. I mean, that's, that, your brain is growing fantastically when you're an infant. You know, it's just your head is the biggest thing on you. And it stays that way for quite some time. It's still that way on Fisher, actually, if you look at him. Two days, completely healed. Wow. Two days.

First application, the first bottle we fed him he stopped crying for the first time in months no way you know the constant like just crying because he's in pain anybody's had guts you know spasms before right right? They're so painful. Oh, yeah. You get those and it stops you dead in your tracks. You can't do anything. Well, in infants, you know, they like to call that colic because they're crying, you know, and that's a colicky baby. They're crying. Well, and people, here's how off mark we've gotten.

That's like pediatrics. Oh, that's normal. That's, you know, kids that are living on breast milk, they're not colicky usually. And if they are, if they're actually sick and there's just something else going on, that's all from the infant formulas, man. And it's not cool. And I don't think it's okay, you know. And I can tell you that the children don't because they're screaming

and they're screaming because they're in pain so you know my first foray into making a commercial product was I was trying to do an infant formula I thought this is horrible there isn't a good infant formula on the market

and it's a tragedy because we totally know how to make one we totally know how to hydrolyze protein there's no reason it's a tragedy because we totally know how to make one. We totally know how to hydrolyze protein. There's no reason it's not out there. When I spoke, and I won't say who the companies were that I spoke to, but I spoke to some of their protein research guys who blatantly said to me, IS, stuff's crap.

And is that still today? And I'm like, well, why are you making it? And he goes, why do you think? And I go, profit? Yeah, sure. It's cheap. And is that still the case today? Are there baby formulas that have more?

There are, but try and find one. You won't find one on a store shelf. Carnation actually had a product out called Good Start for a while, and they were actually, I think they were using a hydrolyzed whey in there. I don't know if that's still in the market. I'm a long way from infants these days. But I do know that they do make some clinical infant formulas that are highly hydrolyzed. But you won't find them in a store anywhere. And I think you have to go online and you got to start drilling down. And I think eventually you'll find them i think that i think abbott makes makes some and maybe nestle's clinical nutrition might have some as well okay

um that's that's the only place you're going to find them you're going to pay like top dollar oh my god the new tramogen that i talked about right was only partially hydrolyzed casein this little uh 12 ounce jar was like 35 bucks or something we wouldn't pay that for a protein for us yeah yeah and those are way better than infant formulas for the most part so so then from there how did you pivot into power crunch well you know i i didn't right away the first thing was hydro hydrolysates taste freaking terrible. They're just the worst. I mean, if you guys want, I'll let you taste a raw hydrolysate and then you'll really appreciate my…

Oh, 100%. I'm for sure. Let's do that, yeah. You'll really appreciate what you're eating and tasting in these products, because you don't taste it. You'd swear somebody dumped ammonia in your mouth there because of all the exposed amino terminals they get really bitter and that's why i think that's been the biggest hurdle if you look in the clinical literature where you know they're doing studies using hydrolyzed whey and there's decades of it now there's tens of thousands of articles about it and they all whenever the conclusions have always

come to is this will never see its way into the commercial market due to the taste impediment and likely the cost. And those still are the two big impediments. I have, it took me five years to find a way to make

the first proto way the powder so that it was didn't taste like terrible and five years just for the flavor just to get it to where it was a palatable protein powder product wow yeah so that was by your biggest hurdle oh yeah initially yeah and i almost gave up several times you know in fact i was getting to the end of the rope and then we had a happy accident in a lab where we were doing the blending and agglomeration, and we had a guy, one of the lab techs messed up the process, and he reversed the order. So you can agglomerate a lot of ways.

Our product's agglomerated. That means it's been spun up with maltodextrin so that it'll solubilize when you put it in water. Otherwise, it just sits on the top. And you notice that about our Proto-A, right? You can spoon stir that stuff if you have to. You don't really need a blender. And with other protein powders, you know, that's not true. They clump up.

And that's because they don't, because of the particle size and the nature of the molecules, they repel water. So cocoa does the same thing. So Hershey's, you know, the powdered chocolate you make chocolate milk with? Yeah. That's an agglomerated cocoa. And that's all they do. They put it in this hopper and they spin it up with hot air and they spray water that has maltodextrin

or some sort of sugar on it. And of course, that's a high affinity to solubilize and that's how I, so that's what we do. But our process is about a five-step process and there's MCTs and there's flare and there's other things that have to get. And the process we were using, I had it at three different teams of research guys

and nobody ever messed with that order of ingredients and we had a guy did it wrong and he brought this in and we all tasted it and I remember it clearly. It was at the end of the day. We've been tasting this stuff all day long. Because, you know, you try this formula, oh, it's no good. It takes them an hour to go agglomerate a new one.

They've got to mix it and batch it and run it through the agglomerator and cool it and bring it back out. And then we try it again. And I've already had 20 days like this. I'm just like, this is not good. I love this right now. Because this is what people want to hear. They want to know how it happened. Yeah, this is like, this is never going to work. And he brings in another sample, and he poured it in little glasses, and we taste it.

And there's three of us. There's myself, my science officer, and this guy who was the customer rep for this lab that was doing the agglomeration. And we all drank it. Nobody said anything. We all kind of looked at each other and went, whoa. And I said, ah, they didn't put the protein in. And we all threw our glasses down and said, I didn't put the protein in. So he calls the lab guy and he says,

man, I think you forgot to put the protein in that. And he goes, no, I put it in, man. I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, well, it is the right viscosity, you know. So then it's like, really, are you sure? Yeah, okay, well, what did you do? And they're grilling him. You messed it up.

And he's like, he doesn't want to get in trouble and admit that he didn't do it right or the way he was supposed to. And we're like, no, no, no, it's fine. We need to understand what you did yeah just tell us exactly what happened and bingo man just a lucky accident problem solved so you just changed the order of we changed the processing that's all i should say about it change the processing and it doesn't make sense what we're doing if you're an agglomerator it doesn't make any sense but it works so we don't care um yeah we've come a long way since then i have a ton of ip around putting making these kind

of products with hydrolysates as you might imagine we have a bunch of custom masks we've changed every product we make i've had to go in we've had to alter the processing in order to put that product out the end with that bitter hydrolysate in it. And so there's a lot of intellectual property that we have around that now that we've just acquired over the years. And, you know, that's, so that's, I mean, that's one of the impediments. It's obviously more expensive than even the most expensive proteins like WPI. It just is.

That's part of the deal because it's got to run through an enzyme bath and get hydrolyzed. But it's interesting, that process of hydrolyzation, we're using the same enzymes that the gut uses. Pepsin, trypsin, I mean... That's super cool. Yeah. I mean, that process has been altered over the years as well to make

it less and less bitter so what i was using 20 years ago as a raw i have a better raw today not a whole lot better but but better enough to where it makes a difference and then plus all of the you know after hydrolysis ip that we've developed. So it's pretty cool stuff. I don't know about you, Fish, but, like, I can feel my brain growing, like, as we're going on. I mean, the more I talk to him, I'm feeling really good about my brain. Yeah, definitely. I always say, man, if you really had an understanding of just massive difference of just, if you could just like go in and watch the whole metabolic process

from the time that you swallow that protein supplement, whatever it is, a whole protein. And let's just say any animal protein. I won't even talk about plants because plants are just, they're so far distant down the line. Can you live off of it yeah if you have a negative protein balance in your body your body will find a way to extract more protein from it but at what cost it's a huge cost it's not nutrient dense we know that right plant foods are not

nutrient dense they're just not they don't have a lot of what we need in them they have a lot of small things but protein is not one of them so if you don't if you don't not needing carbohydrates or sugars all the rest of it's about uh about um my you know micronutrition vitamins minerals right and all of those botanical substances we really need and we need that stuff from the plant kingdom what we don't need is beans and we don't need grains and if we never ate all of those botanical substances we really need, and we need that stuff from the plant kingdom. What we don't need is beans, and we don't need grains. And if we never ate any of those, or even legumes, we'd be healthy as shit. I'll tell you that. Essential thing.

Yeah. So you guys have, so obviously you guys came with the different flavors of the Power Crunch bars. You guys have the Proto-Way. You guys have the Snapstick for the kids now. You guys got the drinks that we're drinking. Anything guys are working on you can tell us about that's yeah we're always working on stuff um we should have a new flavor to our pretty sometime later this year a new flavor and and we have another line we're working on i won't say a lot about that all right i was so excited to have the red velvet before it was on the shelf. Oh, yeah.

Did you get some of the first stuff? Yeah. One of your employees gave me a bar, and I was like, oh, my God. I had a box in my office, and everybody would come in and be like, what is that? That's crack. And I'm literally like, you guys can't have that. And they're like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean?

I'm like, I only have one box. That's got to last me this whole year. Yeah. I had one bar left, and I was taking like a bite every like day. Because I was obsessed with it. Yeah. My favorite right now is the Snapsick peanut butter and honey. Oh, I haven't had that one yet.

That one's really, really good. Yeah, they're really good. But yeah, you know, look, it's a challenge. And, you know, my whole existence in this business, and I said, you know, I got in professionally in like 1981 when I did actually my first vitamin mega pack for the Great Earth Vitamin Company. And then I, over the next eight years, I did another like 42 SKUs, protein powders, all kinds of, it was all about, you know, sports nutrition. And my partner at the time, Diana and I, we were actually on the cover of that line. I think it was called Great Body Line. But the formulas were all stuff that I worked out along with a guy, a PhD guy that they had in Phoenix Labs labs where they made all that stuff but he was a very academic guy he didn't really didn't think about hey you have to eat stuff and what does it taste like and yeah so that was like he was a great guy to work with and and we actually had

a lot of groundbreaking stuff there we had amino acids that were wrapped in cephalins, which is like a phospholipid. So that, because, you know, most amino acids, if they're not branched chains, if you're eating them as amino acids, your gut just doesn't like it. It can cause diarrhea. And it gets converted to other things if your body doesn't get it.

Well, and also, you're impinging on your uh serum ph levels again right so even though it might be cool to get 20 grams of glutamine in you it's going to have an effect on yours so you're probably not going to be able to absorb all of that but we found uh so one of the things we had and they don't that company doesn't exist anymore but i i've always been curious so one of the things we had, and they don't, that company doesn't exist anymore, but I've always been curious why some of the things that we came up with, I don't see anymore. So we wrapped these in encephalins, and we call them EPS, encephalated, we had encephalated tyrosine, we had all the major amino acids that you can use for specific functions, right? And they were racked in lipids, so they actually got into the blood, into the intestines as a lipid

and went through that metabolic process, and so it didn't need an amino acid carrier. It was really cool stuff. Yeah, super interesting, honestly. Kevin, thank you so much. I know you're busy. I don't know about you, but my brain grew twice the size.

This is probably my favorite episode I've ever had. I agree 100%. A lot of really good knowledge bombs. Anything you want to add, Fish? Anything last words that you have? Basically, I just want to maybe answer anything that wasn't super, not like super clear, but let's just say someone's listening to this because they're like, oh, man, I really want to have my own protein bar, which is a ridiculously saturated market.

Yeah, it is. What would you say to that person as words of encouragement? Not maybe encouragement, but what's the path that they're looking at? If right now they have a product at their house that they think should be on shelves, what is that going to look like for them in a short two minutes? Well, I mean, it's always highly competitive, right? I mean, it has been since the first tiger milk bar came out and right now like right now is a really difficult time if

you if you're a newcomer because the so the bar market was growing along and then in around 2003 4 or 5 when all the act and stuff and all the sugar alcohol things caused so many people, so many digestive issues. It sort of chinked off the growth and a lot of it because the retailers shrunk their shelf space down because Atkins had half their shelf space at one point in time. So the market sort of stopped growing for a while, but then everybody, we came along, and we had different products,

and people started making better-tasting bars. And so since about maybe 2010, the bar market as a whole, in other words, how many bars are actually being consumed and purchased, has been growing. That's sort of leveled off about the last 12 to 18 months. So it means that we've kind of saturated in terms of how far, and it's a bigger market than it was then, but it's still not really growing anymore.

So you have to grow within that and you have to have a I think you need to have any unique offering you're gonna do it one of two ways you're gonna have a truly unique offering and you're gonna market it that way or you're not gonna have a unique marketing but you're gonna tell everybody you have and that works and you as a consumer have to find a different look I mean it's just been some pretty big successes that way yeah all right and if you sleep okay with that yeah you said it I didn't say that. And if you sleep okay with that, yeah, you said it, I didn't say that. You know, if you're good with that, fine.

I make no claims. I just, I'm not interested in that. To me, that's not challenging. I don't know. I guess it is to some people. I'm just, my deal is, if it's not something I'm eating, I'm not going to sell it.

If it's not something, and conversely, what we make here, every one of these products, everybody that works here eats it. Most of our to sell it. If it's not something, and conversely, what we make here, every one of these products, everybody that works here eats it. Most of our families eat it. That creates a responsibility that I feel incredibly, and I've always felt that way about it.

You know, when I first got into this business, the first company I worked for, the Great Vitamin Company, I'm talking to their execs, and I'm like, well, you don't use this, and you don't use that. And these are all their products. I'm using them. This is why they brought me in to start a sports nutrition line for them.

They're like, no, no, no. I'm like, well, but you're in this business. Okay. All right. Whatever. You know, I mean. That says a lot for me. me well that's like you writing your programming and not doing it you know i mean that wouldn't make any sense either yeah

yeah that's how i feel about it and man i i want the best so when i get into this thing about plant proteins versus animal proteins i came to that with absolutely no bias i was a vegetarian for about nine months i tried the whole thing. And I've read everything that's ever been published about it, I think, including all of the papers. And it's just an unsustainable argument. We're human beings. We don't get protein from plants.

Sorry, that's the way it is. I didn't make those rules. And I have no issue to grind with plant food because I love it, man. I mean, there's a lot of times I'm eating stuff just for the taste that I know probably aren't that great for me. But, you know, if you go down and eat indigenous foods, like, oh, my God, you go down to Peru and eat some native Quechua food. That's all squashes and vegetables. They just don't have any protein. Maybe a few eggs here and there.

But, God, the food is unbelievably good, and I love to eat it, man. I just know what the nutrition is my body needs, and we understand these proteins. We know what a soy protein molecule looks like and we know that we don't have and we don't make the right enzymes to crack that we don't make it so it's a slow process hampered by the lack of the proper enzymes to even crack the surface bonds on those molecules let let alone break them down into... If you wanted a plant protein to be useful, you'd have to hydrolyze it.

You just would have to hydrolyze it, and then it would be more useful. Still not the same because when you... When your body does manage to break down plant proteins, you don't end up with the same kind of di- and tripeptides you do when you hydrolyze animal tissue, okay? They're different. And why wouldn't they be?

They're different functions. The ones you get from animals are part of their body. Or in the case of eggs, right, or milk, something that they make. Plants, it's all about structure. It's meant to give them... And the other thing about a lot of those plants is the things that you have to get out of them in order to sell them are their toxins.

And a lot of that stuff is in the plant specifically so that you won't eat it. So that animals wouldn't eat it. So a lot of the stuff... So a lot of plant food has a lot of toxic crap in it that's there to discourage the animals who would normally come up and eat it from eating it. There's all kinds of alkaline substances and biochem in plants that's like not good for you. Soy has a peptide, a lunicinin peptide and it actually inhibits cellular growth

and there's a reason for that in nature that's how it it lunicin's in a lot of plant proteins but that's how it protected itself from the animals that would want to eat it so it's kind of like eat me if you will but you will pay a price yeah and the price was limited growth you know estrogen estrogen there's a lot of things in plants that have to be managed you know so conversely the leafy green stuff can pretty much eat that to your heart's content I'm not saying you should eat pounds of it a day but the other thing that people don't realize about vegetarian diets is you need to you need to cook most of that stuff you're not it's really hard on the human gut to have a lot of uh plant food in its raw state and we know you can't eat grains you just can't eat them unless they're processed right they got

to be cooked they got to be ground fresh i mean. I mean, you can't just pick a rice and eat it. You can't do that with wheat or oats or anything else. Even corn you kind of have to cook. I mean, you could eat it, but pretty raunchy. Wouldn't be great, yeah. But there's a lot of stuff in those foods that if they're not cooked is toxic stuff. So I didn't make the rules. We'll kill off all the vegans and then that'll solve all

the problems yeah um you want to sign us off yeah i think that was a great episode guys um i think you just learned every single thing you need to know about plant and whey proteins and supplements and supplements and how many people can live on Earth on so much food. And I think you learned a whole bunch of stuff. And that's probably the most educational session that we've had so far. I loved it. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Hey, well, thanks. Appreciate it, guys. And that will do it. Once again, thank you guys so much for tuning in on the new Bubba Shrug Podcast Network. Super stoked to be here. Still the same old drill as before. Would love for you guys to leave a review. Subscribe to this new channel. We're trying to prove our worth over here,

so let these dudes know how much you love Fish and I, and then you can let us know what you want to hear on up-and-coming episodes. If you guys have any questions, topics, or even guests that you would love to see on the show, we're going to do our best to make that happen. Keep spreading the word. We love you guys and we'll see you here next week.